What are distinct locations within a cloud region that provide redundancy and failover capabilities called?

The correct term for distinct locations within a cloud region that provide redundancy and failover capabilities is Availability Zones. Availability Zones are designed to ensure that applications and services remain operational and accessible even in the event of a failure in one particular zone. Each Availability Zone operates independently, with its own power, cooling, and networking, which enhances fault tolerance and provides the ability to seamlessly failover to another zone if one experiences an outage.

This architecture allows organizations to deploy applications across multiple zones within the same cloud region, making it possible to achieve better performance and high availability. By distributing resources across Availability Zones, businesses can minimize the risk of downtime and ensure that critical services remain accessible to users.

Data centers refer to the physical facilities where cloud resources are housed but do not specifically imply the redundancy and failover capabilities that Availability Zones provide. Virtual networks relate to the networking aspect of cloud services and do not directly pertain to failover capabilities. Service regions are broader geographic areas that contain multiple cloud data centers, but they do not define the specific locations where redundancy and failover are implemented.